About the Workshop

Need for the workshop

There is an urgent need to understand the forcing mechanisms behind the significant environmental changes now taking place in the Antarctic Peninsula region. These include:

• Decay of ice shelves;
• Decrease in sea ice cover;
• Increase in mean annual summer and winter temperatures;
• Shifts in penguin populations;
• Changes in vascular plant density and distribution;

Specific goals and objectives of the workshop

To develop an understanding of the relative contribution of atmospheric and oceanographic forcing on the climate system of the Peninsula from historic and Paleoenvironmental proxies (marine sediment and ice cores) and to begin to link these changes to global scale phenomena such as ENSO/SOI fluctuations, solar variability, anthropogenic greenhouse gases, or internal instability in the ocean system.

Sponsored by National Science Foundation Office of Polar Program, the
Hamilton College Environmental Studies Program and Colgate University.